Asia brown bag lecture: Cecilia Milwertz

NIAS and ADI invite you to a brown bag lecture by Cecilia Milwertz from NIAS - Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. 

Manufacturing the World – the interconnectedness of Chinese workers and Danish consumers

This lunch talk will present the research project ‘Manufacturing the World – the interconnectedness of Chinese workers and Danish consumers’. As its starting point the project takes the fact that many companies from the global North have moved their production to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), leading China to become ‘the factory of the world’ based on the labour of 270 million Chinese workers. This means that China is present on the body and in the home of virtually every Dane in the form of products ‘Made in China’. For instance 40 percent of smartphones in Denmark are Apple iPhones produced in the PRC. At the same time there is worldwide concern today about the impact of the current culture of production and consumption on diminishing global resources and it is broadly acknowledged that there is an urgent need for change to sustainable practices. The research project is concerned with the paradox between, on the one hand, acknowledging how our current system creates inequality and threatens the possibility of a sustainable future on the planet and, on the other, our continuing perpetuation of this system. It explores this paradox at the micro-level, in the encounter between two groups of actors – factory workers in China and consumers in Denmark. The focus is on how workers and consumers are interconnected in maintaining the system and how they may either promote or obstruct what has been called ‘the great transition’ that is needed to achieve a sustainable and equitable global system. 

Time: 26 November 2015, 12:00-13:00
Place: NIAS, CSS, room 18.1.08

Feel free to bring your own lunch. There will be coffee/tea.

Coming brown bag lectures

15 December 2015: Presentations from the collective project Escalations: A Comparative Ethnographic Study of Accelerating Change by Stine Puri and Lars Højer, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies.

January 2016 (date tba): Prince Peter and The Third Danish Expedition to Central Asia - 7 years in Kalimpong by Trine Brox and Miriam Koktvedgaard Zeitzen, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies

10 February 2016: 'My wife carries a knife!’: Right-wing female militancy and castration/wounding/masculine anxieties in a Mumbai slum by Atreyee Sen, Department of Anthropology